Rice's and Bush's remarks came in the wake of comments from unnamed sources who said the president's speechwriters had included the discredited line in the State of the Union address -- even after the CIA had raised concerns about the quality of the information.

Would like to hear from an actual named CIA source on this for a change. Maybe Tenet?

From the Washington Post:

Senior administration officials said on Thursday that the CIA tried unsuccessfully in early September 2002 to persuade the British government to drop from an official intelligence paper the reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa. At that time, the CIA was completing a classified national intelligence estimate on Iraq's weapons programs that mentioned alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from three African countries but warned that State Department analysts were questioning its accuracy when it came to Niger. The CIA paper's summary conclusions did not include references to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa.

In addition, various news organizations reported Thursday that CIA officials involved in the discussions before Bush's speech was drafted questioned whether his statement was too strong, because of doubts about the British intelligence. The allegation was left in the speech but attributed to British intelligence. Rice said yesterday that "some specifics about amount and place were taken out" of the speech after the objections were raised.

From the SOTU address:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

So far, it looks like the worst we have going is that the facts given in a single line in a speech, based on the say-so of British intelligence as well as CIA information (however tentative the latter), turned out later on to be inaccurate, at least on the specifics. To call this a "lie" is inane. It is hard to even call it "incompetence," unless you assume that Bush should be omniscient. Certainly this statement is not the only thing underlying the Iraq war.

For the record, Britain states that its information came from other sources than the controversial forged papers, but I suppose that doesn't matter to some people.

This is an awful small hook to hang the Democratic electoral hopes on.

Look for Democratic ads quoting the line, with the words "British government has learned that" carefully clipped off.